


dug from the night

by trell (qunlat)



Category: One Piece
Genre: Catharsis, Dressrosa Arc, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-20
Updated: 2015-07-20
Packaged: 2018-04-10 06:13:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4380323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/qunlat/pseuds/trell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>You’re in no state to play doctor, not when your teeth chatter violently with your tremors and your vision is hazy and clouded; but none of the others know so much as how to wrap bandages, and he is—he is your charge, your responsibility, your fault, and so.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	dug from the night

**Author's Note:**

> Written in follow-up to [this comic](http://trelldraws.tumblr.com/post/124301039804/i-wanted-to-draw-something-about-law-actually).

You can’t stop shaking, after.

It’s the elder Riku sister that finds you, collapsed as you are a block away from your grisly deed; her that guides you staggering to the home of the gladiator where the others have gathered, unseeing. You hardly manage to keep track of the bright splash of her dress somewhere ahead of your feet as you walk, stumbling over the cracks in the paving, barely moving your feet.

Strawhat is unconscious on the bed when you reach the little house in the flower field, still and bloody, the others in varying states of disarray.

You’re in no state to play doctor, not when your teeth chatter violently with your tremors and your vision is hazy and clouded; but none of the others know so much as how to wrap bandages, and he is—he is your charge, your responsibility, your _fault_ , and so.

The motions you go through are automatic, ingrained, known to you since you were old enough to know you wanted to be a doctor. (You’d been so young; so starry-eyed with wonder at what you saw your father do, at how he seemed to will away pains and hurts, how he made things stop when no one else could.) With shaking hands you wipe away the dark and dried smears on Strawhat’s face, on his neck, on his hands, clean his cuts and dress his wounds. You don’t know who it is that gives you the bottle of antiseptic, don’t so much glance at the label; the smell and the feel of gauze under your hands is all that guides you, all that keeps you there.

There is no good in you, no gentleness, no capacity for kind touch; but this you still know how to do, and you do it, step after step, isopropyl alcohol acrid in your nose, old blood sticky to the touch. Deep down you’re glad that Strawhat is so deeply unconscious; glad, under the roar in your ears and the shapeless blotches in your vision, that he can’t feel how your hands tremble, how hopelessly you quake.

When you’ve finished with him the elder Riku touches your shoulder. You nearly jump out of your skin, jolt away from her like you’ve been struck, but she’s only asking if you’ll tend to the others, to the gladiator and the hyena, the sniper, the cyborg.

You’ve no obligations to them, not like you have to Strawhat, but you haven’t the will to refuse. Sitting there on the edge of the bed you can feel the panicked guilt clawing its way up your throat, through your veins, through your lungs; doing your doctor’s duty, that’s simple, better than letting it take you, better than stopping to think.

Someone hands you more bandages, more rags, fills bowls of fresh water at your mumbled direction. You bind their fractures, flush out their lacerations; press a compress to the gladiator’s head, tend to the cyborg’s burns, set the sniper’s broken arm. The others talk quietly to each other while you work, a buzz in your periphery, nothing that you care to struggle to hear.

You’ve nothing outside yourself to concern you now, after all; nothing to fear but everything that’s inside you, everything that you’ve learned.

And when at last everyone is tended to, when all your tasks are done; when the sun’s sunk below the horizon, the day’s heat flushed out by a cooler breeze in through the window, all the others fallen off into sleep—

You crawl into the corner beside the bed, curl in on yourself and your sword (your knuckles white around the scabbard, dirty tassels rough against your face), and you _shake_.

In the quiet and the dark, your hands no longer occupied, it crashes down on you, suffocates you. Everything that you’ve done, everything that you are, every way that you’ve failed; it rises up and it takes you, wrings you out, steals your breath and crushes your heart.

You’re a murderer, a monster, a bloody-minded fool. Thirteen years to carry out your vengeance, to put a bullet through your torturer’s skull; and suddenly it’s no longer so simple, because you were wrong and your actions misguided, and it was only after you did it that you could see that it was just what Joker would do, just as he taught you, nothing at all like your savior.

And your savior—Cora, Cora, _Cora_ , the name rings in your head and makes your chest churn, how you wish he was here, how you wish you could tell him you’re sorry, you’re sorry, you’re _sorry_ —

He’d never forgive you, not for _this_ , not for something that he himself would never have done. You know now, as certainly as you’d thought you’d known what you needed to do: even if you begged and you screamed at his feet, he wouldn’t forgive you. If he saw you now you wouldn’t be his son, not anymore; just something twisted, someone he never knew, someone who grew up sick and wrong in more ways than one.

Sitting with your lower back pressed against the wall, your arms wrapped round your knees, your face buried, curled into the corner of someone else’s home with your former allies around you: you want nothing so much as to go back and change it all, to be the one that died at the foot of the castle, bled out just like Joker had wanted. Death is all that can make you even; death is all that remains.

Something touches your hair, and you flinch away, snap your eyes open, the sick horror that’s wound tight inside you twisting like a serrated blade. Woozy with bloodloss, still shaking, still yourself unwashed and unkempt, you almost think it’s Joker, after all: risen out of your nightmares to take you with him, drag you down into the hell you belong in together with him.

But you aren’t so lucky, and the universe isn’t so kind: and you find yourself facing Strawhat, awake, his head raised from the bed, looking straight at you.

“Torao,” he says, quiet, not loud enough to wake the others, barely loud enough for you to hear.

“Luffy,” you gasp out, the first word you’ve managed in what must be hours. Your voice is hoarse, terrified, failing you just like you’ve failed all of yourself.

You stare at him, and he looks at you—his eyelids drooping, mouth a tired frown, and still concern on his face—

And slowly, without saying a word, without asking; he sits up and climbs down off the bed and over to you, and he wraps his arms round your shoulders.

You don’t understand, not for a long moment. All you can think is that he, too, should hate you, that if he’s as empathic as you know him to be he must be able to guess what you’ve done, that he should want to kill you and hurt you, give you everything you deserve.

And in the face of this kindness, in the face of something so simple (so _overwhelming_ ) as a gentle touch in the wake of everything you’ve done to him and everything you’ve wrought; something inside you breaks, cracks all the way through, right down to your marrow, right down to where everything in you’s been trapped.

It flows out of you like tidal wave, all your guilt and your pain, years worth of hurt and heartache and misery so deep-set that it’s all that you know. Tears sting at your eyes and overflow, run down your face as all of it tears free and pours out of you; and you, past awareness, past caring, break down in Strawhat’s arms.

You cry like you haven't since you were a child surrounded by fire and loss, and maybe not even then. You can’t stop it, not any of it, can’t keep it back or keep yourself silent; sob louder and louder, hit the hitch where you haven’t enough breath and pitch right back into sobbing again, hold onto Strawhat and _wail_. It wakes everyone in the house, without a doubt, and if you had any control at all maybe you’d feel ashamed: but instead you just clutch at his shirt and you cry, and you cry, and you cry, this breakdown years in the making, years overdue.

You can’t remember how long it’s been since someone held you. You can’t understand why he would, how anyone could bear to have you near them at all; in the moment all you can think of is the smell of cigarettes and the feel of feathers, and as the grief rolls through you in waves you cling to Strawhat with all your might and you squeeze your eyes shut.

How long you stay like this you don’t know, but it's surely hours, into what counts for morning. Whether people move around you, whether anyone else touches you, you couldn’t say either: only eventually the tears slow, and your sobs falter, and instead you simply shudder in Strawhat’s arms, the twisted thoughts that had taken hold of you giving way to gratefulness, profound and insufficient.

How desperately you love him, then; how desperately you want to give back to him everything that he’s given to you, from this to defeating your demon, for everything. There isn’t, you think, anything that suffices, but when you find your voice again—somewhere amidst your drying tears and the undignified way snot’s dripping from your nose—you breathe into his shoulder, “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” over and over, until the breath is gone from you again.

He’s smiling at you when you make yourself look up, tired but easy, and he says: “It’s nothing,” like it doesn’t cost him anything at all, like he isn’t the only thing holding you together as you come apart at the seams. 

You can’t help the way you hide your face against his shoulder, then, not daring to turn to look around—it’s quiet, and you think everyone who wasn’t as unconscious as Strawhat must have gone, left the two of you as you lost yourself—and seek stillness, listen to his breathing against you. 

It isn’t over, of course; not the aftermath of your mistakes, not facing the consequences of how you’ve lived. But just then, emptied out and exhausted, so far past simply needing rest that you don’t know how you’ve managed to stay conscious, you’re willing to accept the silence, willing to take this respite he’s given you. 

You slide into sleep still in his arms, holding and held, loving and (dare you think it) loved; and for once, just for a little while, you’re sure that you won’t be let go.


End file.
